Page 346 of Burn of the Everflame

She pulled her hand from mine and ran for the stairs. I swore and pulled the Sword of Corbois, following behind her on legs that cracked with each painful step. She stormed into the crowd without slowing, but unlike on the mainland, her presence among Ophiucae’s army did not go unnoticed. They swarmed her like ants, and she disappeared inside the throng.

At her surprised cry of pain, my wounds were instantly forgotten. I roared as I hacked through Descended bodies to find her, heart hammering each time I bellowed her name and she didn’t answer.

I finally caught a flash of blood-streaked white hair gripped in the fist of a snarling Merosian. One second later, his hand thumped to the ground, no longer tethered to his body. Another second later, his head did the same.

I managed to clear her attackers enough for her to draw her sword, but her face looked pale, her confidence shaken. If Ophiucae’s fondness had protected her before, it had apparently met its end.

That left us insurmountably outnumbered, two against a thousand. We tried to fight our way back to the safety of the Temple, but a surge of mindless Merosians trapped us in place. They swung at us without mercy, more vicious than any we’d faced on the mainland. It was as if Ophiucae’s rage at her betrayal had permeated their minds, too, infusing them with his determination to make her pay a brutal price. My calling to protect my mate turned me feral, and I lost myself to a killing frenzy that left me feeling as much an empty husk as the Descended I slaughtered.

The fighting pushed us further inland until the horde was a hundred heads deep in every direction. Each person slain was replaced with countless more. Ophiucae was nowhere to be found, and his army showed no sign of stopping. The gryverns were gone, the Temple was distant. The shore might as well have been a world away.

There was no refuge. No escape.

No more reinforcements to save us.

We were going to die here.

Unless . . .

Unless.

“You have to use your magic,” I shouted.

“I don’t have any,” Diem cried back. “I told you, my godhood⁠—”

“Not your godhood, Diem.”

She didn’t answer, but across our bond, something in her stirred in recognition. The heat around us pulsed like it heard my call.

There had always been something burning inside her. Not the simple flames of the Ignios Descended, but an inferno that burned with ancient might. Teller had been the first to name it. He’d told me his suspicions, fearing that Diem would only smother them beneath denial and doubt, but I’d sensed it long before. I’d felt its warmth every time we touched. I’d seen it in the vision we shared. I’d watched it dance, I’d heard it sing. The day her magic unleashed in the Lumnos dungeon, I knew she was something more profound than a Queen.

My Diem was a destiny. She was justice.

She was fate itself.

“You’re more than what Ophiucae made you,” I told her. “You’re more than the Kindred or their Crowns. And you don’t run from your power anymore. You show the world what power can be.” I turned my back to the fighting and caught her chin, tipping it to mine, whispering against her lips. “Unleash, my Queen.”

In the moon-bright depths of her eyes, a buried ember gleamed. It fed on her anger, her hope, her compassion, her despair. It sizzled with hate and love, ice and fire, rage and relief, searing its name on my bones. Inside the heart I loved so deeply that I’d permanently stitched it to my soul, that ember grew into a spark.

The spark became a glow.

The glow became a heat.

And after millennia of darkness, a long-forgotten Fire began to burn.

The island exploded in a wave of bright silvery Flames. The gleaming ice-white inferno spread from coast to coast. Though it sizzled with enough heat to boil my blood inside my skin, I wasn’t harmed. A sensation washed over me that I could not name, like a hunched spine finally uncurling and stretching high, or a heavy weight removed from one side of a tilted scale.

There was something wounded in it, too. Something vengeful and devastatingly sad. I’d felt its grief in her magic before—in the hours I’d held her burning body in my arms after her father’s death, and again when she’d slain the Sophosians in a sea of silver at Mort-Feu Pass, in all the moments when the heaviness of the world was more than she could bear and she’d given herself over to the Fire.

The light of its blaze blinded my vision. I focused on the touch of my hands against her face, the softness of her skin against the roughness of mine. Somewhere in the midst of the Flames, her song called out to me, and my heart swelled in harmonious response.

The Merosians did not scream or suffer. Their deaths arrived with an eerily peaceful hum. When the light of the Fire dimmed, the once-grassy hills were coated in a crust of glittering black.

I staggered backward, gazing upon her. Diem’s skin had been cleansed of its blood, her wounds healed, her skin shining as bright as the pale Flames that flickered around us. Above her head, the Crown of Emarion had turned into a ring of ash—but from its darkened roots, sparks rained across her shoulders. Her hair danced among them, haloed in one final burst of crimson glow from the blood sun sinking into the horizon. My hand lifted to my heart in worship.

She was exactly as I’d seen her in the vision. There was so much I hadn’t understood of it at the time—her sword, her armor, her Crown, her Fire, none of which I’d seen before. Her features, too heavy and grim to belong to the feisty woman I’d known her as then.

The way she placed her palm against her chest. Not a salute, as I’d originally thought. A tribute to the bond that bound our hearts as one, and a reminder to us both that no magic, no god, and no fate could ever break it.